I just got back from a long, gimpy walk in the woods. One leg is super tight and sore from doing a lot of very steep stair and hill workout this week. The other side has some sort of pulled groin muscle. So I was moving pretty slowly. But I was glad I went. It gave me a lot of time to contemplate things. I thought of about twenty blog posts while I was out there.

I’ve been down this road many a time, where I swear to focus and eat right and exercise and the whole thing. And once I make that decision, usually from sort of numerical wake-up call (the scale, or blood tests, or blood pressure, all of which have given me BAD numbers) I am generally pretty ON it. But then I drift away from that eventually, and I am back in the land of “I don’t want to think about it” until something forces me to.

I really do believe there is something to that whole “Ignorance is bliss” thing. Part of me really violently resists the idea of being AWARE, and of having to pay attention to this stuff. In fact it makes me want to have a freaking TANTRUM. I want to just live my life, and eat whatever I feel like, and don’t tell me what to do!!!I almost ripped my radio out of my car because I get so enraged listening to that frickin Allison Janney and her Kaiser “Thrive” commercials. They sounded so smarmy and finger-wagging. “Put down the ice cream, and have some nice broccoli! Get off the couch, and go for a walk!” Even if I agreed with stuff she was saying, even if I WANTED to go for a walk, listening to someone tell me I HAD to just got me into this very defiant, pissed off mood. 

I know that when I’m in the whole “paying attention” mode I tend to look back on my “not paying attention” self with a lot of disgust, disdain and shame. There’s like zero compassion there. And when I’m in my “la la la la I’m not paying attention” mode, I tend to look at my other mode as rigid, restrictive, punishing, anal and neurotic. There’s just no winning and there’s no seeing eye to eye. It’s a little bit like the Middle East; the chances for peace seem very fragile.

I know that I am about to enter a phase of paying attention. (which is funny because when I set up this blog, I was going to be coming at it from the OTHER perspective) I hope that I will be able to do it without totally hating that self that I’ve been for the past year or so.